The Global Pact on Migration, or The Birth of an Official Truth

«Le “pacte mondial” sur les migrations, ou comment naît une vérité officielle»LE FIGARO/TRIBUNE, 14th November 2018.A text dealing with immigration is being drafted within the framework of the United Nations. Cloaked in fine sentiments, it is in reality a means of exerting moral pressure on Western countries, argues the law historian Jean-Louis Harouel, Professor Emeritus at the University Paris-II Panthéon-Assas. Jean-Louis Harouel has published a notable essay, “Human Rights vs. the People” (Les Droits de l’homme contre le peuple, Desclée de Brouwer, 2016).

The final version of the document, entitled “United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration”, is intended for adoption at the Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, on 10th and 11th December, 2018. The idea behind the text is that migrations will inevitably accelerate, and that we must make sure that it proceeds in the best way possible by abandoning all defensive measures. The document sets out twenty-three objectives, which are organized around two main axes: to guarantee greater security for migrants, and to ensure that they are settled on arrival in host countries in a more “inclusive” way. This is not a treaty, despite the misleading term “pact” used in its title. It will not be legally binding for signatory states. Its recommendations, however, will be used as a means of influencing the immigration policies of [Western] governments. And it will form a foundation for the subsequent development of binding standards.

“The pact encourages states to cut subventions to media that publish or broadcast material deemed xenophobic, or intolerant of mass immigration.”

At first glance, the UN ‘pact’ gives the impression of intellectual honesty. It seeks to take the emotion out of immigration controversies, and to focus public debate exclusively on facts and figures. The pact affirms its commitment to freedom of expression, and to open and free debate. Strangely enough, this debate must necessarily “lead the public to consider the positive effects of safe, orderly and regularized migration”. In other words, the pact enshrines an Official Truth: that migration is by definition beneficial to all parties concerned. The debate is therefore not free. Moreover, the pact encourages states to cut subventions to media that publish or broadcast material deemed xenophobic or intolerant. It follows from this, that a newspaper will inevitably be taxed if it publishes facts and figures that contradict the official dogma that the character of migratory phenomena is necessarily beneficent. The pact is designed to close down all criticism of migration. It is therefore permissible to say that, as in the former Soviet Union, words change their meanings: “open and free debate” means activism in favour of immigration.

“The ideology of free migration destroys the idea of ​​a human group’s specific heritage, forcing it to be opened up to everyone, to be shared with everyone unconditionally and without demur.”

The UN pact on migration seems to be based on the principle that anyone in the world should be able to go anywhere. However, particularly in view of the enormous demographic growth in Africa expected over the next few decades, there will be tens and even hundreds of millions of people trying to reach Western countries. The settlement in Europe of huge numbers of people in search of an Eldorado would be suicidal for Europeans, without even benefiting the migrant masses themselves. A submerged Europe would inevitably be a ruined Europe. As Victor Hugo observed: “The day the misery of all captures the wealth of the few, the game is up and there is nothing. Nothing for anyone”. This is the regressive effect of egalitarianism, especially in its communist incarnation. Paradoxically, there is a communist dimension to the ideology of free migration. This resides in the idea that the world is a ‘commons’, that it belongs to all, that everyone can legitimately go and take up a more advantageous position wherever it might be found. Taking what belongs to others is in keeping with the philosophy of communism. The ideology of free migration brings down the wealth of Western peoples onto their own heads. The sovereignty of a people is founded on their self-possession, their destiny, their identity, their land, their material and spiritual heritage. In one’s own country, one must be able to feel, as they say, “at home” [chez soi]. And the expression aligns well with the idea of ​​property: collective property, providing the material, moral and ‘cultural’ security on which living well is conditional. But the ideology of free migration destroys this property, destroys the idea of ​​a human group’s specific heritage, forcing it to be opened up to everyone, to be shared with everyone unconditionally and without demur. It is therefore hardly an exaggeration to say that this is a form of communism on a global scale.

Free migration has become one of the major theses of human rights as we now understand them: that is, it has been transformed into a secular religion, whose historian François Furet was the first to observe that it had supplanted communism in its utopian role as architect and usher to the Reign of the Good. The militant revolutionaries were not mistaken. Since the 1980s, many of the activists left orphaned by the implosion of the Soviet Union and the decline of the secular communist religion, converted to that other secular religion of human rights, allowing them to continue practising communism clandestinely by attacking a different form of property: the self-possession of whole peoples. The “United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration” is the expression of that philosophy. Little wonder that the United States, Austria, Poland, and Hungary have withdrawn from it, and probably soon Switzerland also. When will it be France’s turn? ⇒ Le Figaro